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Series
B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over ...
“There Is Always a Norther North”: Highway 1, Alaska
There’s a fire burning by Swan Lake. For the sixth time in the last 20 years ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2019
This year’s American Studies Association annual meeting took place November 7–10 in Honolulu, Hawai’i. ASA President, Scott Kurashige, transformed this year’s ...
B-Sides: Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones”
The July 1960 issue of Esquire—dedicated to New York City—included ...
Public Thinker: Kevin Kruse on Why Recent History Is Still History
“Historian. Author/editor of White Flight; The New Suburban History; Spaces of ...
On Our Nightstands: October 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
“Kingdom of Dolls”: Sonneberg, Germany
In her mid-19th-century children’s book, Memoirs of a Doll, Julie Gouraud warns her readers not to unstitch their dolls looking for origins and inner workings ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ASAP 2019
This year the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) convention was held at the University of Maryland, College Park. The hotel bar may have ...
Virtual Roundtable on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”
As its name suggests, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show about inappropriate attachments. The musical dramedy, which aired on the CW for four seasons until finale-ing this ...
B-Sides: Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”
John Ashbery said he was nice—“nice as a person and nice as an artist.” I think it’s fair to say that we don’t have a rich critical vocabulary for nice artists. (And how ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Ego and the Id”
Freud’s ideas have long been absorbed by popular culture, but what role do they continue to play in the academy, in the ...
On Our Nightstands: September 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos
Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how ...
Quizzical: Which Psychoanalytic Literary Term Are You?
Some literary theorists fawn over Freud, others love Lacan, while others still ...
Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Dark Matter and White Empiricism
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of fewer than a hundred Black American women ...
John Kennedy Toole @50
Thelma Toole, the mother of the novelist John Kennedy Toole—author of the extraordinary almost-unpublished novel A Confederacy of Dunces—delivered one of the most irresponsible accusations in ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ATHE
Theater theorists, historians, and practitioners gathered in Orlando for this year’s annual meeting of ATHE, the Association for Theatre in Higher ...
QUIZZICAL: Can You Match the Lock of Hair with Its Author?
Both the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the ...
B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds ...
